Joe Biden’s vaccine mandates experienced a double whammy on Tuesday, as two separate courts ruled against him.
A federal judge in Louisiana blocked Joe Biden’s vaccine mandate for health care workers on Tuesday, issuing a nationwide injunction.
“Louisiana Western District U.S. Judge Terry Doughty’s decision follows an identical ruling Monday from Missouri U.S. District Judge Matthew Schelp, but Schelp’s decision only covered 10 states,” explains the Lafayette Daily Advertiser. Doughty’s decision expands the injunction nationwide.
This ruling is the latest in a series of defeats Biden has suffered in the courts.
“If the separation of powers meant anything to the Constitutional framers, it meant that the three necessary ingredients to deprive a person of liberty or property – the power to make rules, to enforce them, and to judge their violations – could never fall into the same hands,” Doughty wrote in his ruling. “If the executive branch is allowed to usurp the power of the legislative branch to make laws, two of the three powers conferred by our Constitution would be in the same hands. If human nature and history teach anything, it is that civil liberties face grave risks when governments proclaim indefinite states of emergency.”
Doughty added, “During a pandemic such as this one, it is even more important to safeguard the separation of powers set forth in our Constitution to avoid erosion of our liberties.”
Biden’s mandate for federal contractors was also blocked on Tuesday by a federal judge in Kentucky.
“This is not a case about whether vaccines are effective. They are.” U.S. District Judge Gregory F. Van Tatenhove wrote. “Nor is this a case about whether the government, at some level, and in some circumstances, can require citizens to obtain vaccines. It can.”
Tatenhove said the issue was whether Biden had the authority to impose a vaccine mandate on federal contractors and subcontractors.
“In all likelihood, the answer to that question is no,” Van Tatenhove said.
His ruling applies only to Kentucky, Ohio, and Tennessee.
Despite the courts saying otherwise, the Biden administration has insisted that they have the authority to implement the vaccine mandate. “The Occupational Safety and Health Act explicitly gives OSHA the authority to act quickly in an emergency where the agency finds that workers are subjected to a grave danger and a new standard is necessary to protect them,” Seema Nanda, the chief legal officer for the U.S. Department of Labor, said in a statement earlier this month. “We are fully prepared to defend this standard in court.”
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